Bartz: "We Have Fallen And We Really Want To Get Back Up"

Yahoo (YHOO) analyst day is today and Carol Bartz took the stage to kick things off.

Her message: Yahoo took a big stumble from its position in the 1990s and mid-2000s, and today is the first step back to the top.

It'll get there not as a search company, not as "a display company," but as "the largest communications engine online," one that combines "amazing editorial with very sophisticated machine-learning" to entertain some 600 million users worldwide.

11:05: Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect. We're not here to wow you today, we're here to intrigue you.

11:06: So what happened? Yahoo was a big shiny star in 1990s and in the mid-2000s, but somehow we weren't so shiny anymore. 11:09: We want to give that broad feeling of what Yahoo is. We talked to our users around the world. We have 600 million. It's where I got find out what's going on. It's my home on the Internet. It's where I go to check in. The latest news and finance. They go to Facbook, Google, CNN, ESPN, "somebody else's cricket site," but guess what, they come home. They come home to Yahoo. 600 million people. That's scale that nobody else has. That's diversity nobody else has. 11:11, Advertisers are looking for a safe neighborhood. You want to make sure that the audience you're reaching is the correct audience and that there's not another bad audience there.

11:16 We have the largest communications engine online.

11:17 We're not a search company; we're not a display company. We're a broad-based Internet company that shows the best content to 600 million people on the Internet.

11:19, Three speakers today. Tech, editorial, and sales.

11:20, On editorial: "If you don't have this thing called the human brain, you don't have great editorial on your pages. We combine amazing editorial with very sophisticated machine-learning."

11:22, "The last thing that makes us unique is that we have fallen and we really want to get back up. If you haven't had good times and bad times, you don't know what you're doing. We prefer the good times. We have passion to get back there. Today is the start of that."

11:24, We are here to impress you on how we innovate, our scale, our passion, and our wanting and willingness to move forward.